...as to why I'd temporarily abandon my blog. Something happens when you don't write regularly: you get stiff-brain. You believe you don't have anything worthy to say, even though your friends are posting about their new moisture-repelling socks and how potty training's going with the puppy (with pictures). Things, big things, happen, but you neglect …
Tag: on writing
Unexpected Kindnesses
It's been 2+ months since my brain surgery, and I'm clawing my way back to the level of energy I once enjoyed—happy to be thus clawing. When I am tired and things don't get done, I smile and thank God I'm alive, that I'm here to sink into the couch after pulling a bit of …
Writing: The Reach that Doesn’t Sleep or Die
I am blessed to have people who believe in me, even (and especially) when I don't believe in myself. Like the ones who scrawled my work-in-progress in the sand while they were vacationing. We thought of you, it said. We love you, it said. I now understand why writers make such a big deal about …
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The Sunshine Blogger Award
Some bloggers reel me in—usually with a strong literary voice and brutal honesty. I'm a sucker for poetic confession. We all struggle inside ourselves, and I appreciate a writer who can fly that flag and call it fiction or essay or Dear Diary... MrHushHush is one such blogger, so when I saw he was looking for …
A Writing Exercise on Mood Creation
Two canoes. With a rope I drag one behind me and return to the place. The empty canoe yaws and straggles and hampers so I have to relearn my paddle. Last time the water was serrated, chopped into spades by homeless and invisible gusts. The sudden rain made the most fragile bubbles when it struck …
My Muse Experience
Anne Lamott calls it her broccoli. Stephen King calls it his beast. My beast was asleep. I tried prodding him, kicking him, calling him bad names. No roars. No lightning bolts of creativity. Just me, slapping words on a page with the precision of a toddler, becoming more and more certain I was wasting my …
The Most Dangerous Thing We Do
Once this kid—my passenger—grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it hard over while I was driving. Not just a little tug, mind you, but a full-on we-gonna-die! yank. The kind that elicited a blood-curdling scream and a shouted sermon. A 19-year old preaching car safety to a 15-year-old. This kid was all charm and immortality …
A Tale of Two Writing Gigs
Yesterday I had two writing gigs. TWO! The first one was in a library where the security guards pack heat, and there are two of them patrolling the aisles. It's a library where you get buzzed into the restroom and there find lurking an odor more corrupt than King Tut's tomb or my son's gym …
2017 in the Rear View Mirror
2017. Crushed it. Really and truly. Those of you who know me know I beat myself up at regular intervals. I raise self-flagellation to an art form. My friends tell me I'm too hard on myself. If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do me no harm. I like to think I have an …
5000 Words Fall 2018 Short Fiction Winners!
The 5000 Words Fiction Contest is the culmination of our fall class. Students write stories of at least 1000 words, workshop, edit, and post the final drafts to their WordPress sites. Then the students anonymously judge the stories. All I do is tally them! 🙂 As part of our in-class time, students journey through a …
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KL Griffiths 